#oh my god drpp the pattern???
With the exception of the collar and placket, it's all just rectangles. I haven't got any fancy formulas to calculate what your pieces would be, but here's mine:
Main body - 140 cm x 104 cm (cut 2)
(width may vary depending on your fabric - I find a twin bedsheet is the perfect size. Always the top one, since they tend to be less worn out than fitted sheets, and have no missing corners.)
Sleeves - 60 cm square
(Or, they should have been, but I accidentally made these a few cm too short. They can of course be narrower if you want less poof.)
Shoulder strips - 20 cm x 3.75 cm
Armhole binding - 44 cm x 3.5 cm
Neck gussets - 10 cm square
Underarm gussets - 14 cm square
And here's my placket and collar, which are easy to draw up if you've got a clear grid ruler (which is a thing everyone should have. specifically the pink metric ones).
They're basically a rectangle with a little extra pointy bit, and a rectangle with 2 corners cut off.
I mentioned that I wasn't happy with the exact measurements of the placket on my lilac nightgown, but this is the updated version which I think should overlap the right amount.
The construction is very similar to my 18th century shirts, which I have a decently thorough post about here, but it's a few years old and I mean to do a better tutorial sometime in the next few months because I've improved my technique. Nowadays I do more hand basting on my machine sewn shirts, which lets me topstitch more things down by machine.
(I meant to do it 2 videos ago, but I swear the machine sewn shirt one is next, after I finish editing the glove video!)
So, the construction is mostly like the linked shirt, but with these main differences:
- I sew 14 cm of the shoulder closed (because I make my shoulder gussets bigger now)
- Because the body is wider, I put half the gathering in the collar and the other half in the neck gussets, rather than gathering all of it into the collar.
- I leave 12 cm open at the wrist.
- Instead of the hemmed & reinforced slit there's a tower placket, and you can find loads of tutorials for those online.
- I sew the buttons on the cuffs and just do one buttonhole, rather than the sleeve links I do on my daytime shirts.
For pattern piece comparison, I'm 5'9", and my relevant measurements are:
Shoulder - about 16 cm
Arm - 56 cm
Lower neck circumference - 39 cm
Wrist - 16.5 cm
This sort of nightgown is one of the things that's also on my list to make a video about someday, but I probably won't get to it for a long time, so I hope this is sufficiently helpful for now!
I've made 5 so far and my inspiration was this extant late 18th century one. I still haven't made one with ruffles yet, but it's more or less the same overall shape, except mine has a more modern placket with more buttons.
